Last week we had a peek at the overall GPU market, including APUs, and the news was not great. This week Jon Peddie released details on the discrete GPU market, which also saw contractions. When you look at this quarter versus last quarter, sales dropped by 28% and are down 5.7% from this time last year, similar to the trend we saw with the total market. If you look back over time Q2 tends to be a bad quarter for GPU sales and the current market is actually larger in total volume than two years ago, before the mining craze was fully underway.

You can see the details of AMD and NVIDIA's quarter below.

The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter, Nvidia increased market share from last quarter, while AMD enjoyed an increase in share year-to-year."

The findings from Peddie Research for Q2 2018 are in and they show a bit of shrinkage, with the JPR reports, overall PC market decreasing 4.9%, and GPU shipments decreasing 1.5% when compared to Q2 2017. When you break it down into the three competitors you see AMD dropping 12.3%, NVIDIA shrinking 7% and Intel seeing an increase 3%. Intel's increase likely indicates lower cost systems which do not ship with a GPU but instead rely on Intel's HD graphics. This is evidenced by the finding that discrete GPUs were in a mere 32.83% of PCs sold, dropping over 6% and actual discrete GPU sales were down almost 28% from last quarter.

There is a silver lining to this cloud as these sharp drops could very well indicate the end of the mining craze which has been driving GPU sales and prices higher recently.

"The PC market is showing more stabilization, and now seems to have shaken off the gold rush fever of crypto-mining, overall volume slipped, albeit with bright spots for the market here and there."

While we reported recently on the decline of overall GPU shipments, a new report out of John Peddie Research covers the add-in board segment to give us a look at the desktop graphics card market. So how are the big two (sorry Matrox) doing?

GPU Supplier

Market Share This Quarter

Market Share Last Quarter

Market Share Last Year

AMD

18.0%

22.5%

37.9%

Matrox

0.00%

0.1%

0.1%

NVIDIA

81.9%

77.4%

62.0%

The big news is of course a drop in market share for AMD of 4.5% quarter-to-quarter, and down to just 18% from 37.9% last year. There will be many opinions as to why their share has been dropping in the last year, but it certainly didn't help that the 300-series GPUs are rebrands of 200-series, and the new Fury cards have had very limited availability so far.

The graph from Mercury Research illustrates what is almost a mirror image, with NVIDIA gaining 20% as AMD lost 20%, for a 40% swing in overall share. Ouch. Meanwhile (not pictured) Matrox didn't have a statistically meaningful quarter but still manage to appear on the JPR report with 0.1% market share (somehow) last quarter.

The desktop market isn't actually suffering quite as much as the overall PC market, and specifically the enthusiast market.

"The AIB market has benefited from the enthusiast segment PC growth, which has been partially fueled by recent introductions of exciting new powerful (GPUs). The demand for high-end PCs and associated hardware from the enthusiast and overclocking segments has bucked the downward trend and given AIB vendors a needed prospect to offset declining sales in the mainstream consumer space."

But not all is well considering overall the add-in board attach rate with desktops "has declined from a high of 63% in Q1 2008 to 37% this quarter". This is indicative of the overall trend toward integrated GPUs in the industry with AMD APUs and Intel processor graphics, as illustrated by this graphic from the report.

The year-to-year numbers show an overall drop of 18.8%, and even with their dominant 81.9% market share NVIDIA has still seen their shipments decrease by 12% this quarter. These trends seem to indicate a gloomy future for discrete graphics in the coming years, but for now we in the enthusiast community will continue to keep it afloat. It would certainly be nice to see some gains from AMD soon to keep things interesting, which might help lower prices down from their lofty $400 - $600 mark for flagship cards at the moment.

Jon Peddie Research's latest Market Watch adds even more ironic humour to the media's continuing proclamations of the impending doom of the PC industry. This quarter saw tablet sales decline while overall PCs were up and that was without any major releases to drive purchasers to adopt new technology. While JPR does touch on the overall industry this report is focused on the sale of GPUs and APUs and happens to contain some great news for AMD. They saw their overall share of the market increase by 11% from last quarter and by just over a percent of the entire market. Intel saw a small rise in share though it does still hold the majority of the market as PCs with no discrete GPU are more likely to contain Intel's chips than AMDs. That leaves NVIDIA who are still banking solely on discrete GPUs and saw over an 8% decline from last quarter and a decline of almost two percent in the total market. Check out the other graphs in JPR's overview right here.

"The big drop in graphics shipments in Q1 has been partially offset by a small rise this quarter. Shipments were up 3.2% quarter-to-quarter, and down 4.5% compared to the same quarter last year."

Market analytics firm Jon Peddie Research recently released estimated market share and GPU shipment numbers from Q1 2013. The report includes information on AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and Via and covered IGPs, processor graphics, and discrete GPUs included in desktop and mobile systems powered by X86 hardware. The report includes x86 tablets but otherwise does not factor in GPUs used in ARM devices like NVIDIA's Tegra chips. Year over Year, the PC market is down 12.6% and the GPU market declined by 12.9%. It is not all bad news for the PC market and discrete GPU makers, however. GPUs through 2016 are expected to exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.6% with as many as 394 million discrete GPUs shipped in 2016 alone.

In Q1 2013, the PC market is down 13.7% versus last quarter (Q4 2012) but the GPU market only declined 3.2%. This discrepency is explained as the result of people adding multiple GPUs to a single PC system, including adding a single discrete card to a system that already has processor graphics or an APU. By the end of Q1 2013, Intel holds 61.8% market share followed by AMD in second place with 20.2% and NVIDIA with 18%. Notably VIA is out of the game with 0.0% market share.

In terms of GPU shipments, NVIDIA had a relatively good first quarter of this year with an increase of 7.6% for notebook GPUs and desktop GPU shipments that remained flat. Overall, NVIDIA saw an increase in PC graphics shipments of 3.6%. On the other hand, x86 CPU giant Intel saw desktop and notebook GPUs slip by 3% and 6.3% respectively. Overall, that amounts to PC graphics shipments that fell by 5.3%. In between NVIDIA and Intel, AMD moved 30% more desktop chips (including APUs) versus Q4 2012. Meanwhile, Notebook chips (including APUs) fell by 7.3%. AMD's overall PC graphics shipments fell by 0.3%.

In all, this is decent news for the PC market as it shows that there is still interest in desktop GPUs. The PC market itself is declining and taking the GPU market with it, but it is far from the death of the desktop PC. It is interesting that NVIDIA (which announced Q1'13 revenue of $954.7 million) managed to push more chips while AMD and Intel were on the decline since NVIDIA doesn't have a x86 CPU with integrated graphics. I'm looking forward to seeing where NVIDIA stands as far as the mobile GPU market which does include ARM-powered products.